What is the mystery that triggers creation? I wrote Grammars of Creation to understand it. But at the end of my life, I still don’t understand.

But would understanding mean that you miss out on the art?

In a sense, I am happy that I don’t understand. Imagine a world where neuro-chemistry could explain Mozart… It is conceivable, and I find it frightening.

Mozart can be “explained” in terms of musical theory, vibrating strings, displaced air molecules, and the structure of the inner ear as it is; would it really make a difference to add neurochemical jargon into the mix? Or more importantly, would it make the total experience of Mozart’s music any less enthralling to have a conscious inkling of how all these different systems interact to produce it? And how does it follow that art must magically come unbidden from a vacuum in order to have any power at all?

Reading “Crampton Hodnet,” a Barbara Pym novel set in North Oxford, Epstein gets the sense that “gossip traditionally has worked best in a small, one might even say tight, community.” I can’t help wondering how many citizens of small communities whose destinies are not in Barbara Pym’s benevolent hands would agree.

In any case, we all live in a small town now. Epstein acknowledges the power to libel and “wreck lives” made so widely available by the Internet. But he cites no more than a handful of online gossip’s casualties, in examples ranging in gravity from Malcolm Gladwell’s reputation (after his inclusion in a database of bad tippers) to a Rutgers student’s suicide (after video of his encounter with another male student was streamed online). Nor does Epstein seem particularly interested in gossip’s relationship to power, though he suggests it may have a role in revolutions. What for him constitutes a kind of spectator sport has been (and still is) for the disenfranchised a means of reconnaissance, a way of acquiring information crucial to their status and survival. It’s not for nothing that the two groups most notorious for trafficking in gossip have been women and gay men. Epstein quotes Leo Lerman, who said he kept a gossip-filled journal “because I am always interested in the disparity between the surface and what goes on underneath.”

Well, I suppose. Pascal Boyer wrote in Religion Explained about what he called “strategic information” — essentially, knowing what other people are doing and saying when they might not want you to know it. He suggests that deities and other lesser spirits are extrapolations from that concept — we humans are always limited in our access to strategic information, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that there could be some who have unlimited access? As circumstantial evidence, he notes that “gods” always seem to be primarily interested in who’s sleeping with whom, who’s telling lies, who’s stealing, and any of the myriad other behavioral concerns so typical of small communities, rather than in more abstract knowledge (“Does God know what every insect in the world is doing at this very moment? Does he know the contents of every refrigerator in the world?”) Interesting theory.

Anyway, I just feel like acknowledging here how grateful I am to the age of digital anonymity for allowing the freedom to choose your relationships to a much larger degree. I can’t help but think that people who romanticize small-town life must either be incredibly straitlaced and boring, or they’ve never actually lived in one.

The difficulty with prophecies — whether based on passages from the Bible or ancient calendars, on solid climate science and economics or the visions of the Mongolian shamans Lawrence E. Joseph visited while researching his books — is that they are almost invariably wrong. Human beings are remarkably bad at predicting even relatively short-term, simple occurrences, such as the weather on Monday or the price of gold on Friday, much less something as vast and complex as the future of humanity. Many important events of the recent past came as a surprise to most people: World War I, the stock market crash of 1929, the Cold War, the computer age, the economic meltdown of 2008, the Arab Awakening, even the Occupy Wall Street movement. Part of the problem, as Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, is that we are equipped with a concept of “cause” that constitutes little more than an association of things or events in the past — and projecting the patterns of the past onto the future is perilous. We read books of narrative history and biography and get the impression that what made things happen, what shaped the story, was always sharply defined and clear, when in fact it wasn’t and more likely still isn’t. The real problem with the future is that it doesn’t yet exist, and the forces that bring it into existence are too complicated, too subtle and volatile and fractal, for us to know in advance — or ever.

And yet we continue to try. Why? Because we need to have a sense that we control our fates, even if all that means is that we know our fates. And because we need to believe we are part of a story with a larger meaning, that vice is rewarded with punishment, that redemption is possible, that history is not random and empty, that a higher power (whether Isaiah’s wrathful God or simply the natural world) exacts the final judgment.

I’ve got the book Longing For The End in the stack of books waiting to be read, as it happens. Guess I better hurry up and get it done before next December if I want to at least die in the comforting embrace of wisdom!

I think the second paragraph sums it up pretty well, but I would also add in a dash of Nietzsche: “However, the fact that generally the ascetic ideal has meant so much to human beings is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui [horror of a vacuum]. It requires a goal—and it prefers to will nothingness than not to will.”

I first encountered the work of Michel Foucault in college. Intrigued but confused, I decided to look for videos of the intellectual giant explaining his theories in a way that might be more intelligible than his obscurantist writings. To my excitement, I encountered a fascinating debate between Foucault and Chomsky aired on Dutch television in 1971. The exchange between the figureheads of the European and American Left, respectively, was a true clash of titans. By the end of it, however, I had lost most of my short-lived obsession with Foucault and had sided instead with the radical linguist Chomsky.

Later, while doing graduate studies in Paris, I was taken aback by the extent to which intellectuals are still revered in French culture, as if they were some kind of postmodern priests. Thinking back of Foucault, it struck me how ironic it was that the founding father of discourse analysis should be praised for speaking a discursive dialect that no sane person could believably claim to fully understand. What is the point of criticizing the reproduction of power through academic institutions if you willfully reproduce that same very power through your own unintelligible language?

Given the fact that Foucauldian discourse analysis is meant to reveal the obscured power relations undergirding social interactions in everyday life, there must have been an exclusionary purpose to Foucault’s flamboyant style of writing and speaking. In my own discourse analysis of Foucault, his was a desperate attempt to turn commonsensical statements about the role of language into seemingly profound truths backed by the culturally-respected veil of social theory — common sense dressed up in the hot air of ‘philosophy’.

Or, as Chomsky himself would later go on to say:

Quite regularly, “my eyes glaze over” when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don’t understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish.

remember a cashier at Barnes & Noble ringing up a book by Nietzsche for me and enthusiastically asking if I liked Foucault too. “No, I tried reading him, but it just seemed… I dunno… pointless.” I knew Foucault considered himself in intellectual debt to Nietzsche, and I really wanted to find something of value there, but my youthful gut response still holds true for me. People I respect like Brian Leiter seem to think highly of him, but I just couldn’t find any there there.

Oh, no, I haven’t finished all the ones from the last picture I took. These are just the ones I’ve added to the list since then.

I did finish Spook last night, though. It was well written and laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it ended up on that annoying note of supercilious evenhandedness so typical of people who write about religion and science as if reconciling them is the most important thing. Like this:

“I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago… Perhaps I should believe in a hereafter, in a consciousness that zips through the air like a Simpsons rerun, simply because it’s more appealing—more fun and more hopeful—than not believing. The debunkers are probably right, but they’re no fun to visit a graveyard with. What the hell. I believe in ghosts.”

Not to mention that she approvingly cites “Maria’s shoe“, of all things, as being the closest thing to a “dazzle shot”; i.e., a case that would be extremely difficult to refute.

Wasn’t I just writing this morning about intellectual inconsistency? As before, bumper stickers give you all the proof you need that people don’t always patiently follow their thoughts to a logical conclusion. I saw these on a car in town today:

When I first read the Jesse Bering column that Chris Clarke parodied the hell out of, it took me a few minutes to decide whether it was for real. I mean, I vaguely recall having read some dumb stuff from him before, and I guess I knew in the abstract that there were people who come off like a fundamentalist combination of Freud and Darwin, but I couldn’t say I’d ever encountered one in the wild. Maybe he was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek?

Three years ago, Dr Rowan Williams wrote a book about the 19th-century Russian novelist, in part, he says as a reaction to the attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others. The Archbishop felt that when he spoke to atheists about faith they seem to be talking about something very different to him. In their eyes, faith was seen as “a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can’t bear the weight of reality”.

Dostoevsky wrote that if you tried to get a group of people to agree that two plus two equals four, they were almost bound to say “why not five?” There was something stubborn and perverse in the human imagination that wanted to go beyond the obvious. Dr Williams says, “I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is.”

Eighteen minutes in, Dr Williams sums up the connection between fiction and faith:

Fiction helps you to understand that whatever the principles, whatever the sort of standing rules and perspectives on the moral and the spiritual life, human beings are every bit as unpredictable as Dostoevsky sets out, that they resist rational cataloguing and categorisation, and they often resist reasonable solutions. And you don’t begin to understand humanity unless you understand that thread of wildness that’s in it all.

Most people I know believe blatantly contradictory things. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; none of us are aiming to fit our lives perfectly under a system of rational organization. But most people don’t have the self-assuredness to stand proudly in the intellectual nude with Walt Whitman and let their non-sequiturs dangle in the breeze. They’ll still feel a sense of embarrassment if you point out those contradictions and will attempt to resolve them, something that probably wouldn’t happen if they were simply being creative or rebellious. Methinks the archbishop is refusing to distinguish the exuberance of imagination from the shame of incoherence.

But ask yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion? For Pinker, the two scenarios are exactly the same, since in both, an individual person has a 99 percent chance of dying peacefully. Yet in making a moral estimate about the two outcomes, one might also consider the extinction of more individual lives, one after another, and the grief of more families of mourners, one after another.

Today’s higher populations also pose a deeper methodological problem. Pinker plays down the technical ability of modern societies to support greater numbers of human lives. If carrying capacity increases faster than mass murder, this looks like moral improvement on the charts, but it might mean only that fertilizers and anti­biotics are outpacing machine guns and machetes — for now.

There is also a more fundamental way in which the book is unscientific. Pinker presents the entirety of human history in the form of a natural experiment. But he contaminates the experiment by arranging the evidence to fit his personal view about the proper destiny of the invdividual: first, to be tamed by the state, then, to civilize himself in opposition to the state. The state appears in Pinker’s history only when it confines itself to the limited role that he believes is proper, and enlightenment figures as the rebellion of intelligent individuals against the state’s attempt to exceed its assigned role.

There’s much, much more in what I suspect is the definitive takedown of Steven Pinker’s latest book by Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.